This blog deals with issues pertaining to natural dignity and worth that all humanity deserves under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. You will find articles about Life issues pertinent to Christian living and faith.

“Our once great western Christian civilization is dying. If this matters to followers of Jesus Christ, then we must set aside our denominational differences and work together to strengthen the things that remain and reclaim what has been lost. Evangelicals and Catholics must stand together to re-establish that former Christian culture and moral consensus. We have the numbers and the organization but the question is this: Do we have the will to win this present spiritual battle for Jesus Christ against secularism? Will we prayerfully and cooperatively work toward a new Christian spiritual revival ― or will we choose to hunker down in our churches and denominationalisms and watch everything sink into the spiritual and moral abyss of a New Dark Age?” - Mark Davis Pickup

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

DR. DIANNE IRVING ON HUMAN EXPERIMENTATION

Dr. Dianne Irving

My good friend Dr. Dianne Irving of Bethesda Maryland responded to the last post, "Remembering Irena Sendler" and provided an article she wrote and published with LifeIssues.net, a number of years ago. I think it is worth revisiting. With Dr. Irving's permission, here is her paper about Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele's inhuman experiments on twins. MDP

As a biochemistry major at the end of my
Junior year, I had already had some of my research published earlier, so my department
head suggested that I could do something “different” for my senior thesis if I
wanted – like medical ethics (bioethics didn’t exist yet!).I thought about it, and remembered being
touched by a small book we had read in a Junior year Chemistry Conference
Course – courses each student was required to take in their major for their
last two years in order to integrate their own special fields or
“concentrations” with the other areas of knowledge.Junior year’s course usually took the
students through their academic field’s long historical development, and in
chemistry we had read a small book by J. Bronowski, a
philosopher/scientist/journalist who wrote during and after World War II,
especially about the Nazi medical experiments used to achieve eugenics which
soon became the focus of the Nuremberg Trials.

Bronowski recalls the time when the bombs
had just been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.He found himself on a small ferry filled with
military personnel who were assigned to observe, study and report the immediate
consequences of these bombings as the ferry drifted closely along the Japanese
shoreline.He tries to describe the
devastation but has profound difficulty finding words that could describe the horrific
scene drifting surreally before them.He
recalls the strange, piercing, and awkward silence on the ferry stuffed with so
many “observers” – all but one sound.From
the metal megaphones fixed in the ceilings of the ferry drifted the haunting
music of one of the popular tunes of the day, and he was struck by how it
captured so perfectly what he was finding so difficult to articulate.The name of the song was, “Is you is, or
is you ain’t my baby?”, and as a philosopher of science it had haunted him
ever since.The devastation that lay before
them had a signature.

Nazi doctors & human experiments

And his words had made me stop and ponder
about any moral obligations and moral accountability I might have as a brand
new research scientist myself.What
exactly had taken place in those Nazi medical experiments with human subjects?How could such brilliant scientists and
physicians have conceived and carried out such abominable crimes against
humanity in the name of “science” and “the greater good”?“Well, they were just ‘untermenchen’ and going
to die anyway;might as well get some
good out of them”!And given that the
first moral obligation of a
researcher is that the science being
performed on human subjects is as
accurate as possible, and performed
only by those academically credentialed and qualified [Nuremberg Code], just
how did the Nazi human medical experiments measure up to even that initial but
critical international moral standard?I
would do my senior thesis on the Nazi medical war crimes – even though the war
seemed so long ago (!) (This was 1963).

It was difficult for me to narrow my topic
for my thesis, and my department head kept forcing me to get more and more
selective.For a year and a half I
haunted the halls of the Library of Congress, my desk constantly piled high
with books, manuscripts, films, etc.Indeed, they were still finding such documents and items almost on a
weekly basis, and often the clerk would simply bring me a wicker basket stuffed
with the latest items.For months at a
time I even watched the hundreds of raw film footage of the Nazi concentration
camps that was pouring into the Archives – although I always had to stop at
times, because I simply couldn’t take it any more.At such times I would just shut down my desk,
grab my coat, and get out of there – arriving back at school with one huge Excedrin
headache.

Dr.Josef Mengele

One of those items they brought me in a
wicker basket one day was the actual lab book that belonged to Dr. Mengele,
along with piles of random photographs taken in his lab of his “patients”
during his experiments.[[For some odd
reason it is claimed today that no such lab book exists; but it did, as I held it in my hands several
times.]] One set of twin experiments attracted my attention – those performed
on about three-year old blonde hair, blue eyed Eastern European Gypsy twins.One twin would be held as the “control” of
the experiment;the other twin was
subjected to serial experiments, designed to mimic wounds of Nazi soldiers in
the battle fields.

The twins were kept in cages right in
Mengele’s laboratory, just off his office.The cages measured 1 ½ by 1 ½ by 1 ½ meters.During the mornings Mengele would come into
the lab to visit with his “girls”; such times he was always dressed impeccably
in his suit.He would take the girls out
of their cages and bounce them on his knees, asking them to call him
“Papa”.But in the afternoons he would
come back to the lab wearing his starched white lab coat, and the girls knew
then that it was time for more experimenting.He would take one of the twins into a small narrow closet-like space,
where he would take a knife and remove more and more of her femur bone in one
leg – and then observe.No anesthetic,
no pain killers, no antibiotics, no ice, no bandages, no nothing – thus
resembling the conditions of the battle field.After he finished cutting the twin’s leg bone, he would simply carry her
over to a “stretcher” and let her remain there until she was ready to be placed
back into her cage with her sister.The
photos of the tiny suffering little girl in that dense and dark “recovery”
room, so butchered, and bloody and pathetic, would be etched into my memory for
a long long time – a memory that I would carry with me into the rest of my work
to come.

After finally graduating, I worked at the
bench at NIH (NCI), doing research in radiation biology and in viral oncology,
and eventually given a career appointment as a research
biochemist/biologist.But I left NIH
after 7 years to study the brand new field of “bioethics” --mostly because of the many ethical issues I
“experienced” at NIH as a bench researcher, especially seeing the patients
there to whom our research was being applied – sometimes ethically, sometimes
not so ethically.So I became a member
of the First Generationers – the first graduate class to go through the Kennedy
Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University.This was 1979, one year after the publication of The Belmont Report
of the National Commission – fulfilling their Congressional mandate to
“identify the ethical principles that the United States government should use
in dealing with issues concerning the use of human subjects in experimental and
therapeutic research” (National Research Act 1974)!This was the formal “birth of bioethics”, and
the “new ethics” would be grounded in the new Belmont bioethics principles of
autonomy, justice and beneficence (all quite oddly defined). We First
Generationers had no clue.

I won’t go into how utterly un-Catholic,
much less unscholarly, we all found this new “bioethics” to be;long, brutal, ugly battles, dirty tricks, and
deceptions.All of us graduate students
knew that there was something VERY wrong with that "bioethics"
picture.But I finally got to the point
where I was required to submit my proposal for my doctoral dissertation to the
Graduate Dean.At first I was going to
do it on the use of human subjects in research;too broad.Since the real
uncharted territory was the use of “Group Two’s” in research – i.e., human
subjects who were particularly vulnerable and thus needed stricter legal and
ethical governmental protections – I finally narrowed it down to the MOST
vulnerable research subjects, i.e., the use of living human fetuses in
experimental research (an on-going scandal in the research community at the
time).I ordered and studied all of the
current international guidelines on fetal research;too broad.How could I get this topic narrow enough for the Graduate Dean?

Perhaps I should do it on human embryo research
-- a then-uncontroversial issue that was just beginning to get noticed in
Australia.I started compiling the
bioethics literature on human embryo research that had already started
moving into our U.S. bioethics literature.Still worried that this too was too broad a topic, I immersed myself
into these articles to identify an even narrower issue.It was about three o’clock in the morning; I
was blurry-eyed, when I finally came to the journal writer’s conclusion after a
very long, contorted and flimsy argument as to why “surplus” IVF human embryos
could be “ethically” used in destructive experimental research – for “the
advancement of science” and for “the greater good”.His final statement nearly made me leap out
of the couch – “Well, they are going to die anyway, so we might as well get
some good out of them”!Good God!Where had I heard THAT before!?Years earlier.No, I just couldn’t bear to go there again,
too complicated; somebody else would have to do it.NOT ME!I slammed the journal closed and shot up to bed to get a few hours of
sleep before I had to catch a plane the next day for Minnesota.

I had earlier received a call from
bioethics guru Art Caplan.He was
organizing the first-ever conference on Bioethics and the Holocaust, in
Minnesota.He had remembered that I had
told him one time about my earlier thesis on the Nazi medical war crimes and
especially that I had bought films about the Holocaust from the National
Archives – could he borrow them for the conference, etc.?If I could help him with this, he would be
sure to get me into the by-invitation-only (and heavily guarded) conference.[[You can hear the various presentations at
this conference, available from http://www.chgs.umn.edu/educational/confAudio.html]].

Bergen Belsen prisoner

So there I was in Minnesota, sitting in the
audience after already three of five days of this amazingly tense
conference.Oddly enough, the Holocaust
– like abortion -- was one issue that we bioethics students were not allowed to
talk about in class, nor was it ever addressed in the rapidly bulging bioethics
literature, so I was eager to attend this conference dedicated to such a
“verboten” issue in bioethics.The
fellow on my left turned out to be a German Lutheran pastor.While a young boy he remembered how his
house’s back yard backed up to the woods near Bergen Belsen, and he recounted
to me so sadly how often they would see sick, tortured, bone-bare starved,
often naked escaped prisoners wandering fearfully, desperately and aimlessly
through those tangled woods.Sometimes
the local people would sneak them food and water, but they too were terrified
to be caught giving aid.Those memories
of his boyhood were also etched into his memory as well – so much so that it
was the major reason why he became a pastor, and why he had traveled all the
way from Germany to attend this unique conference in Minnesota.

The very tense program had consisted of
researchers, bioethicists, and Holocaust victims taking turns presenting their
arguments as to why the data which resulted from those horrific experiments
should or should not be used now to help others.Of course, the Holocaust victims who
presented their arguments were in total agreement that such blood-tainted data
should not be used.They were getting
older and grayer now, sometimes barely able to hobble to and from the microphone,
but powerfully persuasive speakers.One
researcher, who for two days argued vehemently that the data should be
used, walked up to the microphone again this day and began his same drill yet
again.So we were totally astonished
when, right in the middle of his paper, he stopped, became very silent, put his
head down, shook with grief, took off his jacket, rolled up his sleeve, and
laid bare the various tattoos from Dauchau on his arms!No, he recanted, he was so sorry, he just
couldn’t do it, he must change his argument and agree with the other Holocaust
victims that such data should not be used!﻿﻿

As he pathetically apologized and slumped
off of the stage, the next Holocaust victim slowly limped with great effort to
the microphone to present her own arguments.I noticed at once that she was so young – how could she have been a
Holocaust victim and yet be so young?She didn’t even look Jewish.The
blonde, blue-eyed victim began her speech.At the very young age of about 3, she and her sister had been used by
Mengele in his infamous twin experiments.Her sister was the “control”;she
was the “patient”.Mengele kept them in
cages right in his laboratory, just off his offices.The cages measured 1 ½ by 1 ½ by 1 ½
meters.

During the mornings Mengele
would come into the lab to visit with his “girls”;such times he was always dressed impeccably
in his suit.He would take the girls out
of their cages and bounce them on his knees, asking them to call him “Papa”.But in the afternoons he was come back to the
lab wearing his lab coat, and the girls knew then that it was time for more
experimenting!

I really thought I was hallucinating!I literally felt my body sinking right
straight through the seat of my chair, even down through the hard wooden floor
itself, and below.I grabbed the leg of
the poor German pastor on my left to keep me from free-falling through to the
basement – it was HER!This was the
pathetic little girl I had done my biochemistry thesis on, whose photo of her
tortured pain-wracked tiny body had been etched on my brain since those days
long ago in the Library of Congress!It
just couldn’t possibly BE!But it
was.I listened to her entire
presentation, almost mouthing the words before she could even say them.The kind pastor understood;I had told him my story the afternoon he had
told me his.“Go meet her”, he insisted,
“You must”!So trembling, and somehow
deeply embarrassed and oddly mortified, I waited for her on the steps of the
building as she came out.As soon as I
(rather awkwardly) explained things to her she completely lost her composure,
and the two of us just sank down onto the steps together and talked and cried
for quite a while.My little Gypsy girl
now has a name – Susan Seiler Vigorito.The final title of my doctoral dissertation at Georgetown was, A
Philosophical and Scientific Analysis of the Nature of the Early Human Embryo
(finally defended university-wide in 1991).

I realize now that the war has never really
ended;nor has the quest for
“eugenics”.What could not be
accomplished on the battle field is now being accomplished behind locked doors
in laboratories around the world. And I ask myself on a daily basis now
Bronowski’spiercing question, “Is
you is, or is you ain’t my baby?”

2 comments:

I was organizing some papers the other day and I came across notes of when my son, Father Peter West and I met you at the Guadalupan Appeal Conference in Mexico City in October of 1999. You gave a talk on The Dignity and Status of the Human Embryo at that conference. I thought I’d check the Internet to see what kind of activities you’re involved in at this time and I brought up the composition you wrote in college about monster Mengele. Just as I finished reading the article at 11:00 o’clock Tuesday night, 9/3, Peter was calling me on Skype. He arranged a three way call from HLI Headquarters in Front Royal, Va. and my “daughter,” Sister Helena, at the Motherhouse in Germantown, NY and me in Fairfield, NJ. I told them what I was doing and said I’d send them the link. Peter has been with Human Life International since September 2011. He’s presently traveling to many parts of the country with the icon of Our lady of Czestochowa explaining what it’s all about.

I was organizing some papers the other day and I came across notes of when my son, Father Peter West and I met you at the Guadalupan Appeal Conference in Mexico City in October of 1999. You gave a talk on The Dignity and Status of the Human Embryo at that conference. I thought I’d check the Internet to see what kind of activities you’re involved in at this time and I brought up the composition you wrote in college about monster Mengele. Just as I finished reading the article at 11:00 o’clock Tuesday night, 9/3, Peter was calling me on Skype. He arranged a three way call from HLI Headquarters in Front Royal, Va. and my “daughter,” Sister Helena, at the Motherhouse in Germantown, NY and me in Fairfield, NJ. I told them what I was doing and said I’d send them the link. Peter has been with Human Life International since September 2011. He’s presently traveling to many parts of the country with the icon of Our lady of Czestochowa explaining what it’s all about.